Started using Plexamp recently for my music library - loving it so far!
When syncing to my device (transcoding FLAC to a lower bitrate), I’ve noticed the transcoding is very slow, typically only using ~11Mbps of my ~500Mbps WIFI connection and only saturating ~10% of my 7950X3D cores. I get the feeling that for some reason the Plex server isn’t using as many threads as it could.
This means it takes ~hours to download 50 or so albums, when if I was doing it outside of Plex I could have it done in ~minutes (transcoding in foobar and then copying over FTP or similar). Is there a way to get Plex to use more threads in this situation?
That does sound on the slow side, although I’m not sure what “normal” would be. Make sure you’re not saturating the disk reading the FLAC, I suppose. Maybe others can weigh in on how fast they seem Opus downloading.
Just doing a quick test over here, I’m seeing about 5MB/sec or so, which would imply ~40Mbps or about 4x what you’re seeing (MacOS M2 server), everything Ethernet.
Yeah, 40Mbps does sound quite a bit more acceptable - for reference, if I use Foobar to convert my FLAC library to Opus, I can 100% saturate all 32 threads on my 7950X3D, so I don’t think my NVMe drive or RAM are bottlenecking this. Over FTP I can also transfer at much higher than 11Mbps to the same devices, so network doesn’t appear to the bottleneck either.
If there’s any screenshots or logs I could provide to help identify what might be bottlenecking things, let me know and I can send them through
i also see low download speed when transcoding … similar to above, fast windows server with no hardware bottlenecks … i’m getting about ~ 12Mbps when transcoding to opus and downloading to plexamp running on the same windows server, and similar when i download to iphone … downloads to mac and android drop to ~ 6Mbps
Random brainfart:
If you have old wireless devices in your home which only comply to 802.11b they can cause the whole 2.4GHz net to get slowed down to the maximum speed of that standard. Which is – 11 Mbps.
See if the same speed limitation applies when using the 5GHz band.
Everything relevant on my network is already on the 5GHz band (as far as I can tell) - when I FTP to my phone from the same PC it’s usually in the 80s - 90s of Mbps in this room, a bit quicker if I’m closer to the router.
server appears to be throttling the transcode (by default) … if i start a download to iphone, background the app (download ~ stops), then foreground the app, i can see the download briefly speed up quite a bit (looking at plex dashboard) before throttling back down to ~ 12Mbps … i don’t see any server settings that affect this (for music)
Look if there is a client setting for this. “Downloads in background” or something like that. And keep the plex client app open and in foreground while waiting for your downloads.
there’s no such client setting that i can see … plexamp just has the quality setting (bitrate threshold to determine which files get transcoded when downloading)
and if you set quality to maximum (no conversion), the download happens much faster, limited mostly by network speed … again suggesting that transcode is being throttled
@stevenregidor Can you check your network pre-caching settings in plexamp? (Settings > Playback > Caching > Network Speed) If it’s set to anything other than unlimited, flip it to unlimited.
@elan I recently started seeing behavior that points to it now affecting more than just song pre-caching.
